What the commentators said

Will the EU offer any concessions? Even Downing Street accepts that it’s unlikely to do so before next Thursday, said Katy Balls in the I newspaper. On that day, the Commons is set to vote on Brexit amendments once again. If MPS don’t use that opportunity to delay Brexit or to take the no-deal option off the table, then No. 10 thinks the EU may give ground on the backstop. Any concessions are unlikely to satisfy hard-line Brexiters, but the real test is whether they satisfy the DUP, on whom the Tories rely for their majority. If May can get something that DUP leader Arlene Foster is happy with, then “the bulk of Tory Brexiters will get on board and No. 10 can look to a small number of Labour votes to get over the line”.

May should be “robust” with the EU, said Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph. Despite all the dire warnings, the public mood is hardening on Brexit rather than, as Brussels had hoped, warming to the idea of a second referendum. Besides, requesting an escape clause from the backstop – a basic part of almost every contract – is “entirely reasonable”. Critics claim a time limit defeats the object of a backstop, said Henry Newman on Conservative Home. But “given that the EU itself argues that Article 50 cannot create a permanent relationship”, surely it couldn’t object to an expiration date of ten years on the backstop. Some believe that “by that point the backstop would be legally challengeable anyway (ironically, at the European Court)”.

It’s ridiculous for the EU to risk a no-deal outcome over the backstop, said Ian Acheson on Capx. The “hard border” of popular imagination is not going to return to Ireland because one never existed in the first place. What we had was a “militarised border. But let’s be clear, the SAS weren’t sent into South Armagh to intercept someone smuggling fags from Dundalk.” The checkpoints were there purely as a response to the IRA threat. Ireland is a more peaceful place today, thank goodness, said Cliff Taylor in The Irish Times, but London is ignoring the “delicate compromises” on which that peace was built. “Pretty much any change to the existing border would be problematic” and risk fostering “dangerous new divisions on the island”.